This is part 1 of a 4 part series on tapping an abundant resource, maple sap, to make fresh local maple syrup, crème and candy. Parts 2-4 will appear each Friday in March.

It starts in late February to early March around here. The days are getting longer, spring is just a few weeks distant, and a pattern of warm days and freezing nights starts the flow. The maples are at it again. There are no leaves on the trees. The landscape looks bleak. The air is damp and raw. But miracle maples well up with sweet water, oozing forth from any cut or snapped limb. It’s time to pull the buckets out of the barn and start tapping.

Maple sap is an under tapped resource, if you'll pardon the pun. In Quebec, nearly all the mature trees are tapped and Quebec supplies most of the world’s syrup and maple sugar. But stateside only about 2% of productive trees are currently tapped.

There's an opportunity here, if you are lucky enough to live in southeast Canada, the upper Midwest and Great Lake States, or New England. Maple trees can be tapped annually for over a century with no harm to the tree. Sugar maples are best, but red and silver maples can be tapped as well. The rule is one tap for a tree over 10 inches in diameter, 2 taps for a 20 inch tree, and 3 for a tree over 24 inches. Each tap should be 4 inches or more away from previous taps.

The taps are made between waist and chest high, over a root or under a limb, with a sharp 7/16th inch drill. Then a 'spile' is tapped in snugly with a hammer, and a bucket with lid is hung. Soon a pleasing drip, drip, drip is heard on warm days. The buckets are emptied and contents collected for boiling. Sap must be treated like milk and kept cool to avoid spoilage. Pick a warm winter day in the 40’s or high 30‘s. You want to see a forecast with a run of several mild days and freezing nights.

Here’s a pictorial step-by-step:

First locate a likely spot and drill a 2 ½ inch hole with a 7/16th inch augur bit. Power or hand drill, your choice.

Place the tap or spile and drive it snugly home. Don’t over hammer or you’ll split the hole, damage the tree, and the tap will leak.

It should look like this when you’re done.

Once the tap is in, hang the bucket and put a lid on it to keep out bark, needles and bugs. They may add body to the syrup, but keep ‘em to a minimum.

Hang the bucket…..

Secure the lid…

Sit back and let the buckets fill. Check ‘em every day or two.

In the next few posts we’ll cover collecting and storing sap, boiling the sap into syrup, bottling it and making maple cream or candy from it. From a cold hard tree to a warm stack of pancakes, maple syrup is an overlooked resource, a woodland delicacy, and a sweet partnership with Providence…

For more information on maple sugaring, check out the Massachusetts Maple Producers Association. Next week: Bucket by Bucket - The Gathering!